TV Rants & Ramblings: Arrow 1.14 – “The Odyssey”

For the first time since Arrow premiered, we’ve got an episode with a larger percentage of flashbacks instead of a present day bad guy to deal with as Oliver confronts his mother about her secrets.

Previously On Arrow…

I was really excited to see how Oliver handled the interrogation of his mother after barreling through the window with the opening line of: “Moira Queen, you have failed this city!” to end last week’s episode, but things get embarrassing for the green archer after taking out the two guards (the other two businessmen seemed to have just disappeared into the ether as they clearly had no chivalrous bone in their body to go to the aid of the sole woman in the room). After pleading her case to be spared for the sake of her children, Moira pulls a fast one on her son and puts a bullet in his chest. Think of the psychological damage had she actually killed him!

New Addition To The Team

Luckily Felicity just happened to be working late this night, and Oliver happened to know which car was hers and where she put it in the parking garage, because he would have been very embarrassed had he been bleeding through his green leathers in someone else’s back seat.

I doubt I am alone in high levels of excitement that Felicity has been officially brought onto team Arrow considering she was practically on the team already. I mean, it was bound to happen at some point considering how much random stuff Oliver is always asking her to do. She would be pretty stupid to not figure it out honestly, so it was definitely appreciated when she said, “I may be blonde, but I’m not that blonde.” Really bumps up how deserving she is of those glasses.

Oliver may have been stupid enough to get shot by his own mother, but at least he has the intelligence to ask Felicity to join the team. Her stipulation is that she will only help him find Walter since she isn’t quite as cool with all the killing as Diggle is (I know little about war, but it can’t be a stupid question to ask why Diggle’s unit was protecting a warlord in Afghanistan during this exposition), but I seriously doubt she won’t be brought in to help with more random things considering how much she’s come into play already. That and she’s hilarious (“You didn’t say clear!” and upgrading Oliver’s computers because they were too hard on the eyes are just a couple more examples out of the plethora from the night), so the more screen time the better.

Back On The Island

With this being only 6 months in to Oliver’s 5 years on the island, it wasn’t hard to foresee how well Slade’s plan was going to go for them. Granted the training scene in which Oliver actually has a shirt on for once should have been foreboding enough that things were going to go wrong… Long story short, after some fun with a dud of an old mine, Slade making up for Oliver not using any of his training by failing the one job he was given (though it is questionable why Slade would give him the most important task, even considering the numbers that probably led to the decision), and the writers have Oliver make a joke about the one book he actually read in college to excuse the unlikelihood that he would actually know the random quote from The Odyssey being used as code. Then Oliver throws a wrench in the plan by not wanting to leave Yao Fei behind. Short story even longer, Oliver gets comedically punched out by Yao (who is protecting his daughter by working for Edward Fyers) before Fyers is far too forgiving of the inexcusable fact that Oliver is still alive. Then Deathstroke, who isn’t really Deathstroke since Google clued me in to what I missed last week about Slade Wilson being the name of the real Deathstroke in the DC universe, gets distracted from beating on a rather antagonistic Oliver as Slade saves the day after rethinking his belief that everyone is in it for themselves.

Considering saving someone’s life is a pretty strong friendship trigger, it should be interesting to see how these two go from being partners to enemies now that they’re stuck together for a while longer. The Deathstroke mask we saw with an arrow through it in the first episode had to get there somehow, and I doubt Billy Wintergreen is coming back from a knife to the eye. We also know that at some point Oliver comes back into contact with either Yao or his daughter since he has a matching dragon tattoo on his shoulder, and Yao is the master archer that Slade hasn’t given any indication of being. It is all just a matter of time.

Final Thoughts

With 4.5 more years on the island, it should be interesting to see where this part of the show goes from here. That and Oliver will have to figure out a way to circumvent threatening his mother again in order to find out what she’s hiding since that didn’t work out so well for him. Maybe Felicity will have some ideas now that she’s on the team.